There is a threat to those who develop new technologies that others will reverse engineer their new technologies. The threat puts commercial businesses at risk that their competitors will reverse engineer their products to obtain proprietary technological or embedded information that is critical to maintaining the business's market share. Government systems developers are at risk that enemy nations will use reverse engineering processes on government equipment, and use the stolen technology against them. For both, the economic costs can be substantial and, for governments, such reverse engineering can affect national security.
In order to mitigate the threat of reverse engineering, a layered approach to embedded protection in systems equipment is used to thwart the reverse engineering process. One level of protection is known as outer volume protection. It protects against attacks to the system's chassis (or electronics box) housing the internal assembly, or assemblies, where proprietary technology and information are found. The outer volume protection can include technology to thwart attacks through the input/output ports, Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) ports, and power outlets, etc. Another set of layers of protection include software and components level protection; primarily for the purpose of protecting proprietary code and data. Software protection is typically limited to the use of data encryption, executable inspection programs, hardware keys or dongles. Another level of protection is an intermediate level of protection such as an active barrier architecture that overcomes the weaknesses in the other aforementioned layers of protection.
Unfortunately, no protective measures are perfect. Given enough time and resources, many protective measures can be overcome. In particular, if the outer volume protection is compromised, an unauthorized user has ample opportunities and access to decompile and reverse engineer the actual motherboard and/or other subassemblies and components. Existing protection of the data on subassemblies and components historically has a very low rate of success in stopping reverse engineering of the data. Additionally, some applications do not have full electronic box protection for various reasons. For example, full box protection is often not desired where a single board assembly is sufficient for the system or product. In such situations, it is, presently, a facile reverse engineering process to gain access to subassembly and component features. Therefore, it is even more important to have an effective, intermediate layer of protection for the vulnerable, resident, proprietary data.
For the reasons stated above and for reasons stated below which will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for an effective means of protecting data on electronic components.